Listening to the Mahalaya song on the morning of made me tearful - the familiar effect of this music on me the longer I have been away from home, family and roots. I can pretend none of that matters most of the year until on the first day of Puja, the sound of Birendra Krishna Bhadra's voice triggers good memories I have left behind. The mild nip in the air, waking up very early in the morning and tuning into Akashvaani to listen to this with my parents. The scene was repeated in every Bengali household - we were a community in a way we never were any other time of year. This was the music that set the stage for Puja - a much simpler affair when I was growing up in a semi-rural place outside Bengal.
There were enough Bengali people there for Puja to be a big thing and the everyone else was more than happy to participate in the festivities. So even if Bengali centric, it was not a celebration that excluded anyone. Very few of my friends were Bengali at the time but their enthusiasm for Puja was no less than mine. We all looked forward to this time. It is unlikely anyone of us thought too deeply about good and evil, the symbolism and the esoteric interpretations of the Puja.
It was a time to celebrate, wear new clothes and eat a lot of street food. The predictability of the whole thing was a huge source of comfort - no matter what happened in people's personal lives year-round, they could count on Puja arriving on schedule and being able to have the experiences they had come to expect during that time. I miss that more than anything else - Puja to punctuate my existence in way that made the rest of it read more cohesively.
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